Cyanogenmod 10.1 - Galaxy Nexus

I've had my Samsung Galaxy Nexus for over 6 months now and I've realized a few things in that time. First is that the software on the phone, is much more important than the phone hardware. I would rather have Jelly Bean on 1 year old hardware, than Ice Cream Sandwich on the latest phone hardware. This is why the Galaxy Nexus was a good choice for me because with it, I can be on the latest version, though I do have the Sprint version, which does lag a little, but ultimately isn't the reason I moved too Cyanogenmod.

I ran Cyanogenmod on my previous phone, the Sprint EVO 4G. That made a huge difference and was much more pleasant than the stock HTC Sense interface which could be slow, though it did have some nice features to it. This time, having the Galaxy Nexus, even though it was the Sprint version, and being stock Android, my desire and need to move to a custom ROM was very small. Ultimately, the reason I moved was for just a few features that I wanted.

The first thing I love about the Cyanogenmod 10.1 release is that the pull down can be notification or the new Android quick settings. If you pull down from the center to the left, it is your normal notifications, but if you pull down from the right, it is your quick settings. You can also add more items to the quick list like GPS and LTE, which I really needed as well.

The one other thing I like, now that I am moved over is the circular battery indicator. I didn't care about this at first, but it is very easy to read and view exactly how much battery is left. The stock indicator can be very misleading at times. The new indicator is a must have for me now.

All in all, stock Android is an amazing, and I could get by on it just fine. Cyanogenmod though offers those few customization that just make the experience ever so slightly better in my opinion, making Android just that much better. I just wish I wasn't stuck in a contract with Sprint and their super slow data speeds in my area, but that is another story.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hyperthreading for Gaming - Worth it ...

The Intel Core i7 has been out for over a year now. It without doubt is the fastest processor and it's cost clearly shows this. The question is, is this excellent performance due to its heavily advertised hyperthreading (HT) or is this mostly and advertising gimmick. Lets take a look at the facts and see. An article at vr-zone.com shows that in the games Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 enabling HT actually causes a reduction in performance. In Crysis not even one frame per second but in Far Cry 2 it 9 frames shy. http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-core-i7-hyper-threading-helps-/6160.html At iXBT Labs, they ran tests disabling HT and Turbo Boost. In numerous cases, the HT either didn't help, offered very little gain or actually caused a drop in performance. In the games tested, only one game actually saw a boost in performance with HT enabled and it was only a 1% gain. The other 7 saw either no change or a slight drop. http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/ci7-turbo-ht-p1.html Another te
Read more

Galaxy Nexus on Sprint

I recently upgraded my phone on the Sprint network to the Galaxy Nexus. My HTC EVO 4G was still doing well for me but it lacked Ice Cream Sandwich. When looking at phones on Sprints network, I noticed they had the Galaxy Nexus. This is supposed to be a phone from Google with the pure android experience. The Galaxy Nexus was out for close to a year but I liked it better even though it had older hardware. This was largely in part due too having Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean has a super smooth interface and is very fast and fluid on the Galaxy Nexus. The screen is 4.65 inches and is very bright. The phone has no static control buttons but uses the new soft buttons that became an option with ICS. This is nice because you don't have space consumed by static buttons. Instead, they are a part of the screen and can disappear as part of the running application, for instance a movie can consume the entire 1280x720 pixels. It also has a hidden LED for notification that has 3 different colors.
Read more

Quake 4: Linux & ATI

I love using Linux. Earlier this year I purchased Doom 3 for the sole purpose of being able to play a high end game in Linux. I finished that game up a while ago and was once again wanting to have something in Linux. The next game I naturally chose was Quake 4. I love ID software for producing everything needed for these games to run native in Linux, and for that I'm gladly willing to support them so that they keep creating wonderful Linux games. I hope that other company will follow there example. The game arrived and I was very eager to give it a try. Once I installed the game I remembered that a major thing had changed in my computer since I had ran Doom 3. This change was my video card. I had changed from my Nvidia card, known for its quality driver in Linux to an ATI who hasn't had, in previous years, the greatest Linux drivers. Well, I installed the game and tried starting it up. I received then an error stating 'GL_ARB_texture_compression not found', then I would
Read more